Not another “ghost river,” pleasehttp://www.hcn.org/articles/not-another-ghost-river-please
I’m biased in favor of flowing rivers, yet my favorite, the Rio Grande, has been anything but flowing lately. Over the past few years, it’s been drying up downstream of Albuquerque every irrigation season between mid-June and Halloween. It seems odd to say it, but the river hasn’t the right to its own water. Instead, people do, using its water to cover their fields and orchards or run their taps until there’s no water left at all.

This year, more than 20 miles of the Rio Grande dried. Thirty dried last year, and 50 miles in 2012. In southern New Mexico, about 200 miles of the “river” are sandy for nine months of the year. As a former archaeologist — someone who has taken pick, trowel and brush to the remains of people who have passed — I can’t help but wonder what this says about my own culture: We use so much more than we can afford, no matter the consequences. There’s a term people use now for the Southwestern rivers that have ceased flowing regularly in the past century — “ghost rivers.”

But there’s still hope for another river in New Mexico.

Unlike the Rio Grande, which has been manhandled by diversions, dams and reservoirs, the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico runs how it pleases. If the rains don’t arrive, it trickles. When storms roar across the Mogollon Mountains, it swells and surges.

Right now, New Mexico is facing a big decision on the Gila.

Thanks to a string of court decisions and a law passed in 2004, the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission has had 10 years to decide a big question: Should New Mexico spend $66 million in federal money to meet future water needs in four rural counties through conservation and efficiency? Or should the state accept an additional $34 to $63 million from the federal government to help build a diversion dam on the Gila, just downstream from where the river pours out of the nation’s first congressionally designated wilderness area?

By the end of the year, the state must announce if it’s chosen one of the three proposed diversion plans. Lowball early estimates of the projects put costs from $42 million to $500 million — plus a half-million to $9 million annually to operate and maintain the infrastructure. Outside analysts, including those with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, have pointed out problems with the proposed locations, identified engineering flaws with the structural designs, and questioned the ability of the reservoirs to actually hold water.

Not only that, but state officials don’t even know how much water — in real life, as opposed to on legal documents — the Gila could yield each year.

Retired Interstate Stream Commission director Norman Gaume and two other experts recently looked at the Gila’s historical flows and estimated that the state might get about 12,500 acre-feet of water a year. But about half the time, they said, the annual yield would likely be zero. Factor into that a recent climate study showing that as the region continues to warm, the Gila’s annual flows will average 8 percent less than between 1951 and 2012.

All those facts seem daunting, and yet, all indications currently point to the state choosing diversion over conservation and efficiency.

Meanwhile, I think about a stretch of the Gila just downstream of Turkey Creek. Since last September, when floodwaters ripped down the mountains, a C-shaped chunk of the riverbank has disappeared, creating a pool 20 feet below the trail. This is a naturally flowing river; erosion tears land away from one place and then sends it somewhere else.

Of course, the Gila will continue to change. In another century, people hiking here could see any number of sights: If winter snows cease falling regularly in the southern mountain ranges, this stretch’s flows will dwindle. And because the Gila is a feast-or-famine river — one that trickles or rages — the curve of the channel will by then surely be new. I hope the sycamores that have recently started returning will still be here, and thriving.

As someone who’s always wondering what future generations will think about the things we leave behind, I hope that in a generation or two, people won’t be staring down at yet another ghost river and the ruins of a failed dam. Using water more efficiently, conserving what we have – I hope we’re wise enough to try that first.

Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She writes about natural resource issues in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Cindy Mernin puts it bluntly: "Paradise isn't for sissies!" she says, recalling the 14 years she spent as a ranger's wife at Yellowstone National Park. In particular, as she tells author Marjane Ambler, the winters weren't for sissies. The couple had moved there in the early 1970s, before the roads to Lake Village, Wyoming, were groomed during winter. Mernin, who grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, learned to fix Ski-Doos and survive "brutal" winters in the park with a handful of rangers, workers and their families, who had to fend for themselves from fall through spring. But it wasn't easy. "I wasn't chained down," she told Ambler. "But at the same time, I was just as confined."

Ambler herself spent nine winters at Lake Village when the park hired her husband, Terry Wehrman, as a snow groomer in 1984. (If Ambler's name seems familiar, it's because she worked as an editor at High Country News from 1974 to 1980, when HCN was based in Lander, Wyoming.) In her memoir, Yellowstone Has Teeth, Ambler doesn't romanticize the isolation of Yellowstone's backcountry in winter. At that time, Lake's winter population consisted of 12 employees and their spouses. With travel by snowmobile the only way in or out of the village – on a route that required crossing avalanche-prone Sylvan Pass – there was plenty of "forced togetherness" and little privacy. The friendships forged in such intimate and interdependent conditions, however, have survived for decades.

Ambler, the kind of third-generation Colorado native who was always handier with a chainsaw than a curling iron, finds herself content on the "fringe of civilization." And unlike the folks she interviews who wintered in the park during earlier decades – before electricity or Ski-Doos – she and Terry had a full-sized refrigerator. With the help of an antenna and booster, they could even listen to NPR.

As much as anything, Yellowstone Has Teeth is a story of beauty – of solo ski treks beneath crystalline skies and the "deep moan" of lake ice freezing. Ambler has consciously penned an ode to those Yellowstone winters now passed. But between the lines, she also shares a love story –– of a husband and wife who weathered adventures together and built a life based not only on affection, but also on real trust.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBooksMontana2014/05/12 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleNew anti-wolf, anti-fed film features "wolf cages" to protect kidshttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/wolf-cages-at-school-bus-stops-are-touted-in-new-film-by-an-americans-for-prosperity-director
Driving through southwestern New Mexico this summer, I passed one of the area’s wolf-proof school bus stops. I’d heard about the enclosures for years and couldn’t resist pulling off Highway 180 onto State Road 32 to check one out in person. More recently, the cages have been featured in a new documentary film, “Wolves in Government Clothing.”

Walking up the gravel road, I tried to envision leaving my own seven year-old at the remote intersection. Even if I did drop her and drive off – with no homes close by, I doubt many kids hoof it there – I wouldn’t leave her in the cage.

Peering into the eight- or ten-foot high wood and wire enclosure, we found its bench smashed and the dirt floor covered with trash. To be fair, school had been out for over a month. But the flimsy, trash-filled box didn’t convince me it sheltered many schoolchildren. The first of the cages were built in 2007 by a local school district; a picture of children looking out from a cage near Reserve, N.M. appeared in newspapers at the time. Both then and now, the cages smell of a publicity stunt.

A structure built to protect children from wolves waiting at a school bus stop. Photograph taken by Laura Paskus off Highway 180 onto State Road 32.

A vocal group of citizens in southwestern New Mexico have long fought the Mexican gray wolf recovery program run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its state and tribal partners – a program that hasn’t actually been a resounding success. Despite more than a decade of planning and 15 years of on-the-ground work, only 75 wolves roam the recovery area in Arizona and New Mexico. Thanks to political wrangling, local opposition, a pledge to remove or kill wolves that prey on livestock, and a highly restricted recovery area, the program remains far below its goal of 100 wolves in the wild by 2006.

Yet despite the relatively small population of wolves, it’s clear from signs along Highway 180 that local communities are still outraged by the reintroduction of the predators. And now, at a time when FWS is considering removing wolves from protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a right-wing “media consultant” has come along to try to influence that debate and to drive a deeper wedge between rural people and government employees.

David Spady’s new film, “Wolves in Government’s Clothing” is anti-wolf propaganda in its purest form. On the film’s website, the Montana-born Spady describes himself as an outdoorsman and filmmaker who has traveled the West looking for people who have been victims to wolves, government agencies and the ESA. A public affairs and media consultant, Spady is also an advisor to Salem Communication Corporation, which owns and operates about 100 “mostly Christian” radio stations, and he’s also the California director of the Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group which was founded in 2004 by David Koch and Koch Industries board member, Richard Fink.

The author's daughter looks into a structure built to protect children from wolves waiting at a school bus stop. Photograph taken by Laura Paskus off Highway 180 onto State Road 32.

Narrating the film’s trailer, Spady says that when government agencies become like predators, they behave much like wolves: Both are apex predators with no predators of their own, have no respect for boundaries, prey on the weak, work together in packs and use deceptive tactics. It’s a pretty dramatic narrative. But it’s the sort that resonates in Catron County’s rural communities, despite the fact that 54 percent of the county’s population is employed in government and 20 percent are federal employees, earning the county’s highest wages.

In the film’s trailer, a single mom of four says she shouldn’t have to move because wolves have more rights than humans. (The mother, Heather Hardy, has been upset about wolves for a while; she’s quoted in a 2005 Albuquerque Journal story.) Her teenaged daughter appears inside an enclosure – one that looks a lot hardier and cleaner than the one I saw this summer. Kids sit inside the enclosures to protect themselves from a wolf that watches them from the field nearby, she says: “Every kid on the bus has seen it.”

Unlike bear or mountain lion attacks, which make the news every once in a while, confirmed wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare in North America, even in Alaska and Canada where the wolf populations are larger.

To learn more about wolf behavior, I called biologist Maggie Dwire, a FWS Mexican wolf recovery coordinator. Dwire’s been working with wolves for about 15 years. She recalls being alone in a captive-breeding pen at two in the morning, surrounded by wolves in the same pen, as she pushed a wheelbarrow full of meat. That didn’t worry her. Expect her to walk past a rattlesnake? That’s another matter completely. “My snake friends will say, ‘it’s not coiled, it’s not acting aggressive,’” she says. Nothing will convince her to go near that snake. It’s kind of like that with wolves, she says. “When people tell me they’re afraid, my best response is: I believe you.”

As for the wolf watching those kids at the bus stop? “That wouldn’t be typical behavior,” she says. No one has complained to FWS about a wolf threatening schoolchildren. If someone did complain, the recovery team would visit the area, observe if an animal is watching the children, and determine if it’s a wolf. Were human health or safety ever threatened or challenged, says Dwire, the wolf would be removed. Between 1998 and 2012, for example, a total of 71 Mexican gray wolves were removed just for threatening livestock.

A screenshot from the website for the new film 'Wolves in Government Clothing,' created by Americans for Prosperity's California director, David Spady.

Unlike Spady, Dwire doesn’t have a deep, dramatic voice. But she’s not all woo-woo about the canines either.

“People like to romanticize the wolf, you know, say they live in really close family groups; they only hunt the weak, sick, old and young; and that they serve as overseers of the whole ecosystem,” she says. “People like to view wolves as supreme spiritual beings or as demonic killers that kill for sport and surplus. Really, it’s somewhere in the middle.”

To report incidents of wolf harassment, people can call a 24-hour hotline: 1-800-352-0700.

Laura Paskus is a contributor to High Country News andan independent writer, editor and radio reporter based in New Mexico.

]]>No publisherWildlifeBlog Post2013/11/05 13:40:00 GMT-6ArticleProtecting culture in the ancient Sky Cityhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/protecting-culture-in-the-ancient-sky-city
Native archaeologist Theresa Pasqual shares how she works to preserve the cultural resources of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico.About an hour west of Albuquerque, N.M., a sandstone bluff rises above the high desert floor. For more than 800 years, the people of Acoma Pueblo have lived there, protecting their culture, language and many traditional ways. Archaeologist Theresa Pasqual, the director of the Acoma Pueblo's Historic Preservation Office, works with state and federal agencies to ensure that laws such as the National Historic Preservation Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act are followed when archaeological sites and human remains are discovered — as when pipelines, roads, mines, or dams are built on the tribe's ancestral lands in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

Recently, she's also been leading the fight to protect Mount Taylor, which is sacred to the Acoma Pueblo. The 11,301-foot-tall peak — called Kaweshtimi in their language, Keres — dominates the view to the north. It has long been sacred to others, too, including the Pueblo of Laguna, the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation and Zuni Pueblo. With the U.S. Forest Service fielding an increasing number of development proposals — including for uranium mining — the five tribes have set aside their cultural and historical differences and united in support of a sustainable, long-term plan for the mountain. They released an ethnographic report on tribal connections to the mountain -- in order to give the Forest Service and others a better idea of how important the area is to them --and requested that 400,000 acres be designated as a “traditional cultural property.” The state did so in 2009, but mining proponents promptly sued; the suit is currently within the New Mexico Supreme Court.

In early January, HCN contributor Laura Paskus spoke with Pasqual about her tribe’s connections to the landscape, her work to protect Mount Taylor, and her experiences as a Native woman and archaeologist. The interview excerpts that follow have been edited and condensed.

HCN: Can you describe what it’s like to have such deep family ties to the landscape?

Pasqual: Over thousands of generations, this repetition of (the story of) where our people moved from -- not just from place to place, but their interaction with other people on the landscape and their interactions with the mountains and the waters and lakes, which we have traditional names for -- has been continuously passed down, through our reciting of different prayers and songs and stories. There is an active, continual (recounting) of where our people came from, and that happens throughout our traditional season and in our language.

So as a child growing up, there was a connection not only to my immediate family of my parents, my grandparents, and my great grandparents and who they were, but there was also this much larger connection to ancestors — great-, great-, great-, great-, great-, great-grandparents. You could make that connection back to people you had never met, and never seen –– know where they migrated to, where they stopped to make their homes, and what springs they visited. It was as if one knew them, literally, as grandma and grandpa: This is where grandma and grandpa settled, this is where they emerged from, this is where they were given the connection to the animals, this is where grandma and grandpa farmed.

That connection to the past is really important to the work that I do today, and language plays a critical role in that. Those songs and prayers and stories are only said at special times during the year, and they’re said in our traditional language. Language becomes a critical component (of our connection with the landscape), because without it you can’t make that connection (with the springs, mountains, and rivers).

HCN: It seems like Native people and archaeologists often have a different view of archaeological remains. For some archaeologists, human remains are just “data.” What is it like for you -- as a Native woman and an archaeologist -- to work on these sites?

TP: That’s a question that any Native person who has studied anthropology, and especially archaeology, has struggled with. In my community, we have certain taboos and superstitions about the dead. Those are beliefs that were ingrained in me and that I still believe. But I’ve also come to believe -- and I had to learn this from my father -- that everybody has a gift, a certain responsibility.

When I decided to go into archaeology, and realized that I would have to study and handle human bone, I really had to take some time to think and reflect, “Was this really what I wanted to do?” I was nervous. I never told my family what I was going to study, not until much later, when I applied for this job. Then everybody knew what I was doing. That cat was out of the bag!

(I asked my ancestors, saying), “My intentions are only good, I mean you no harm. But whatever it is I am meant to know in this lifetime, whether it is from handling you, or caring for you, teach me what it is I’m supposed to know, so that I in turn can give back. What is it that I’m supposed to give back?”

I have come to believe -- with my position, with my academic training, with my knowledge of forensics and anatomy — that my purpose is much larger than just being the director of the preservation office. Perhaps my purpose, my gift, is to bridge that connection to those remains. If I can go into a curation facility, or go onto the project site and get into the trench and either identify remains, whether by sex or age, and look at the condition of the remains, and report back to my tribal colleagues, that is my gift. That is what I’m meant to do.

Hometown: Creek Nation, Okla. "My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I've heard New York, Paris or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it." From her prose-poem book Secrets from the Center of the World (1989)

Vocation: Poet, playwright, writer and musician with Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band, in which she sings and plays sax and flute.

She says: "It's very important that all children, I think, and all people, have access to arts and are educated in arts. When a culture starts losing that, or the culture no longer thinks it's important, then you know the culture is in danger."

]]>No publisher2012/10/15 02:00:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbAlready gone: a profile of Native American poet Joy Harjohttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.17/already-gone-a-profile-of-native-american-poet-joy-harjo
The author of She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War discusses her new memoir, Crazy Brave.The poet Joy Harjo claims to remember her struggle through the birth canal –– leaving a past world as a warrior with weapons in hand and entering this one "puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen."

Most people don't wonder about the lives they might have lived before they were born into this one; most of us don't go beyond abstractions such as "heaven" or "spirit" when we wonder about what follows our departure from this earth. But Harjo has spent decades exploring the connections between worlds in story and song. Now 61, with striking dark hair and a warm, husky voice, Harjo has written seven books of poetry -- including She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War -- and performed solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She's taught creative writing across the West, including at the University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico, and traveled the world collecting accolades and awards, such as the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She's also written children's books, including For a Girl Becoming, and most recently a memoir, Crazy Brave.

Everyone, Harjo believes, enters this world with a map buried deep in the heart. People know, she says, when they abandon the instructions they're supposed to follow. She had wanted to write about her experiences as a teenaged mother, or about what music has meant to her life –– riding with her parents through Oklahoma in the 1950s, she first heard Miles Davis on the car radio and his trumpet suspended her in "whirling stars." But the story Harjo needed to tell wasn't about motherhood or music. And finally, after 14 years of trying, Harjo surrendered and wrote Crazy Brave.

Writing the memoir may have returned Harjo to places and moments she'd rather not revisit. But reading it offers relief to those who don't always consider "home" a refuge, or who learn in childhood that adults and ancestors are not always graceful or good. "For most people the definition of 'home' is definitely rooted. There is that statement of fact: 'I was born in Tulsa, Okla., in the Creek Nation,' " she says. "But it's a place of shifting: This is not our original home, we were removed by the U.S. government -- and maybe that makes me aware of the disjuncture between the standard definition of home and what home really might be for some people."

Harjo didn't find home until the 1960s, when she came to New Mexico as a teenager. Escaping from her stepfather's house of "bad spirits and pain," she left Oklahoma and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. "As soon as I crossed over the state line, as soon as I was heading up that route from Clines Corners toward Santa Fe, I knew," she says. "My spirit, the heart's voice, the heart's presence, knew I was in the presence of home."

Harjo had already discovered poetry -- on her eighth birthday, her mother gave her Louis Untermeyer's Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry -- and at IAIA she immersed herself in drawing and painting, then performance art. Being surrounded by other American Indian students was a transformative experience. "It was in the fires of creativity at the Institute that my spirit found a place to heal. I thrived with others who carried family and personal stories similar to my own," she writes in Crazy Brave. To be acknowledged and encouraged as artist, she says, saved her life.

Even today, Harjo can't say exactly what made New Mexico feel like home. It seems as though she isn't so much grounded on this earth as she is moving between the worlds, creating new stories and connecting the voices of her ancestors with those of younger generations.

"I feel like I carry a home with me, that has been with me through time," she says. "I'm also aware that this time falls away fast. On some level, I'm already gone. I'm already gone, and I'm very aware of that."

]]>No publisherCommunitiesPoliticsProfiles2012/10/25 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleTwo degrees warmer and rising: A review of A Great Aridnesshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.4/two-degrees-warmer-and-rising-a-review-of-a-great-aridness
Books about climate change tend to be grim reading, but William deBuys' love for the American Southwest makes his new nonfiction book A Great Aridness beautiful as well as disturbing.A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American SouthwestWilliam deBuys384 pages, hardcover: $27.95.Oxford University Press, 2011.

Cracking open yet another book about climate change requires a certain amount of resolve. Most readers already know the facts: In the past 50 years, average temperatures in the United States have risen 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to climb. Rather than contemplate the catastrophes that could result from that rise, some have already surrendered to depression or apathy. Books about climate change are always a hard sell. But author William deBuys' three-decade-long love affair with the Southwestern United States is such that he can't help but tell a beautiful story, even when its subtitle is the ominous "Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest."

In A Great Aridness, deBuys explores climate change models, the tree-ring data that allow researchers to reconstruct the region's climatic past, and phenomena such as Hadley cells (the circulation of hot, moist air from near the Equator), explaining how their expansion will further dry out latitudes on the edge of the cells, including the Southwest. He does this while traveling the region with water managers -- including Las Vegas' legendary and terrifying water czar, Patricia Mulroy -- scientists, archaeologists, planners, attorneys and even human-rights activists along the U.S.-Mexico border.

From the civilization of the original Native inhabitants to the appearance of Coronado and his Spanish army at Zuni in 1540 to the still-ongoing real estate bust in the Sunbelt, deBuys traces the ways in which the people of the region have perished, survived, adapted and thrived over the course of the centuries.

Writing of the Four Corners, where archaeologists have sifted through ruins and other scientific evidence to study enormous prehistoric communities and theorize about their abandonment, deBuys takes the long view: "However one parses matters, today much of the fascination of Southwestern antiquity derives not from worn-out nineteenth century myths about disappearance, but from the saga of Puebloan continuity across oceans of time," he writes. "It is a story as much about adaptation as loss, as much about tenacity and endurance as abandonment."

This isn't an optimistic book; the likely impacts of higher temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation on water supplies, farming, forests and cities are disruptive and alarming. On the bright side, however, people living here today have both history and science as guides. And deBuys' book reminds readers of yet a third guide necessary for those who want to remain in this increasingly challenging region: a deep and unconquerable love for the land itself.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeBooks2012/03/05 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBullies get their way in New Mexico's wolf recovery programhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/bullies-get-their-way-in-new-mexicos-wolf-recovery-program
The state backs out of work to help restore wolves to the Southwest after a new governor appoints anti-wolf advocates to the its Game and Fish Commission.There’s a sign near my house that reads, “Don’t just stand there, Stop Bullying!” I remember being teased by the cool girls in middle school during the 1980s. Having survived adolescence, I naively assumed that pint-sized tormenters mature before reaching adulthood. But not always: Adult bullies employing the tactics of gossip, misinformation and fear have triumphed in New Mexico.

On June 9, the New Mexico Game and Fish Commission voted to end the state’s participation in the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program. That program is the federal government’s attempt to restore wolves to an area straddling Arizona and New Mexico. The effort has been anything but easy, as wolves have been shot, poisoned, transferred from the wild into captivity and “disappeared” throughout their range.

In the 1980s, the federal government set the goal of establishing a minimum population of 100 wolves within their historic range. It was anticipated that the canines would reach that number in 2006. Currently, there are just 50 wolves.

New Mexico’s abandonment of Mexican wolves was not a surprise given last year’s election of Gov. Susana Martinez, the Republican who replaced Democrat Bill Richardson. Since she took office, she has made appointments to several state commissions that helped consolidate power in the hands of industry and anti-regulation representatives. Her administration has also directed the reorganization of the state’s Environment Department, choking off some of its best programs. As for the New Mexico Game and Fish Commission, four of its seven members are her new appointees; one also serves as a board member of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association.

When bullies speak, Gov. Martinez listens. Just prior to the Game Commission’s vote on wolves, for instance, anti-wolf activists as well as the Catron County Commissioners sent letters to the state wildlife commission and Gov. Martinez accusing wolves of putting their children and ranching livelihoods at risk. The critics went to far as to distribute a disturbing photo of a child in a wood and wire cage – a cage that was designed to keep him safe from wolves while waiting for the school bus.

If the recent vote to withdraw support for wolves was no surprise, it remains a serious blow. Somewhat surprisingly, the state’s wildlife department had become an effective advocate for wolf recovery. In 2008 and 2009, it opposed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plans to remove wolves suspected of preying on livestock. Thanks to that stance, the federal agency changed its policy, and those two wolf packs still live in the wild where they have not been preying on livestock.

Now that the state wildlife commission is no longer a partner in the federal wolf recovery program, the department’s role has become murky. The state will apparently refuse any federal money to fund employees to work on the program, and the state’s representatives will no longer participate in the recovery team. The details are still unclear.

But the wildlife department must continue to enforce state and federal wildlife laws within New Mexico’s boundaries, and it must investigate wolf shootings and killings as criminal cases. The department had applied for a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant to pay 50 percent of the reimbursement promised for livestock killed by wolves; department spokesman Lance Cherry says the state is now exploring options on how to administer that grant without using its own staff.

It seems clear that the commission’s decision to surrender to the bullies was rash. But while Tom Buckley, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, calls the state’s decision “unfortunate,” he insists the wolf recovery program will continue -- albeit short-staffed.

However, Michael Robinson, a staffer with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which has sought the return of Mexican wolves for decades, worries that the government will resume its predator control program and start removing “problem” wolves from the wild. It’s “not because the biology has changed,” he says, “but because we have different elected officials.”

When public officials are so easily influenced, creating and managing a sound policy becomes impossible. It’s equally unfortunate that scientists employed by state and federal agencies lack the courage to publicly defend their work and the species they are trying to recover. Until strong, intelligent voices drown out the blowhards, emotions will rule, politicians will call the shots and the public will be confused and frightened by rumor and misinformation.

This is cause for outrage, not apathy or despair. “It’s reasonable to be pessimistic about wolf politics and management,” says Robinson. “It’s not reasonable based on their biology.”

He’s right: Let’s not forget that the Southwest’s wolves survived many years of strychnine poisoning and government bounties. Surely, they can survive the bullies, too.Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is writer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssays2011/06/30 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleSportsmen protest New Mexico antelope hunting systemhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.22/sportsmen-protest-new-mexico-antelope-hunting-system
New Mexico's system for doling out licenses to hunt pronghorn gets a poor grade from the state’s hunters.A lifelong resident of the southern New Mexico town of Deming, Ray Trejo has hunted ever since he could walk. It's a family tradition he shares with his wife and both their sons, who are now in their 20s.

But about 15 years ago, Trejo's luck started running out in the pronghorn hunting-license lottery. "I was always led to believe -- from (the New Mexico Department of) Game and Fish -- that that was because of the drought we were under, and that there was less antelope tags being given," says the bowhunter. Then, a few years ago, Trejo learned that private landowners control most opportunities to hunt pronghorn (commonly called antelope) -- even on public lands where they hold grazing allotments. New Mexico's Antelope Private Lands Use System (A-PLUS) gives participating landowners "authorization certificates" that they can then auction, trade or sell to hunters and outfitters, often for thousands of dollars. The buyer can then use the certificate to purchase an actual hunting license for the land from the Department of Game and Fish.

New Mexico landowners received 4,004 antelope certificates in 2009, according to records obtained by the nonprofit New Mexico Wildlife Federation. In contrast, just 1,785 licenses went into the lottery system. Because state law mandates that a certain percentage of those go to out-of-state applicants, some 12,711 New Mexico hunters competed for just 1,432 licenses. "No one here had any idea the degree to which our licenses had really been privatized," says Jeremy Vesbach, the group's executive director. "It has turned into a system where 70 percent are being resold rather than everybody getting an equal chance with the draw." States are supposed to manage wildlife in trust for the public, he adds, with hunters funding it through taxes and fees.

Many New Mexico hunters say the system is unfair. In 2005, sportsmen tried to reform similar rules for elk, but failed when both landowners and the Department of Game and Fish resisted. This fall, they've been asking the agency's seven-member commission to reform the antelope program. Vesbach wants New Mexico to adopt the system other Western states use: distributing tags through a lottery and having hunters pay trespass fees to willing landowners. That method encourages landowners to improve habitat -- those with trophy bucks can charge higher fees -- but they don't profit directly from the public's wildlife. Montana reformers achieved a similar goal in the recent election, passing an initiative that increased big game license fees for out-of-state hunters by about $200. It also abolished outfitter-sponsored licenses, thereby increasing the number of big-game tags available to locals.

At least a few of New Mexico's Game Commission members are in favor of reforming A-PLUS, which has been in place, though not codified, for decades. Commissioner Kent Salazar believes tags should be the property of the state, not something that private citizens can distribute. At the commission's October meeting, he also proposed amending the system so certificates can only be used on a rancher's private land, and not on adjacent public-lands grazing leases. "That passed," he says, "but there was such an uproar at the meeting that we decided to revisit it." Then, at a Dec. 9 meeting in Clovis, N.M., the commission voted 4-3 to codify A-PLUS essentially as is, without amendments.

The existing program works well for landowners, argues Darrel Weybright, New Mexico's big game program supervisor. Ranchers, who own most of the state's antelope habitat, are "happy to participate because meat prices are down, and it's hard to make a living in a semi-arid landscape," he explains. The extra money they earn is a hedge against selling out, subdivision and habitat fragmentation.

"Based on the free market, they can sell to who they want," says Weybright. And New Mexican hunters could also buy the authorization certificates, he adds, although not many do. That may be because most are what Vesbach calls "blue jeans" hunters, who can't afford premium prices.

Weybright admits the situation is difficult, but calls it a "wonderful study of social issues meeting wildlife management." Despite the commission's decision, the New Mexico Wildlife Federation plans to continue trying to reform the system. Any commissioner can request that a rule be reconsidered, says the group's spokesman, Joel Gay, and new commissioners selected by the incoming governor might think less favorably of the program.

Ray Trejo isn't optimistic.

Hunting families are losing their enthusiasm for big game draws, he says, because they don't ever win. "If we're not careful, we'll be extinct, and it'll be a rich man's game."

This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.

The big arroyo has no attachment to the way things are. The arroyo is the space the water and the boulders and other debris pass through in floods, the space that desert animals and I move through. The space that is the arroyo changes with every flood.

More than 30 years after publishing her first novel, Leslie Marmon Silko has penned a self-portrait. A poet, essayist and short-story writer as well as the author of three novels -- Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes -- Silko is undoubtedly one of the West's most influential writers. She's also notoriously private, which makes The Turquoise Ledge all the more alluring.

Silko's memoir begins with recollections of her childhood in the Pueblo of Laguna, a reservation an hour west of Albuquerque. She writes of horses and sandstone, of blue corn enchiladas and of hunting deer with her father on the flanks of Mount Taylor. Silko relays a complex family history: She descends from the Laguna and Cherokee tribes as well as tribes in Texas, but her family's roots also extend into Mexico and Europe. Her mother's father belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, and her father's family's household included Juana, one of four young Navajo sisters captured by Spanish slave hunters during the 1823 military campaign against the tribe.

Most of the memoir, however, concerns the author's daily life in Arizona's Tucson Mountains, where she has lived since the 1970s. To Silko, these mountains represent home -- and healing. Readers learn about the trails she explores and the beauty she encounters, and come to understand her fierce sense of right and wrong, particularly when it comes to wildlife and developers, earth and bulldozers.

This is not a book for readers who like to put their favorite writers inside neat boxes. Silko generally relies on her childhood memories of places and faces and doesn't insist on resolution or redemption. Nor does she stuff her memories, stories and facts into a linear narrative. Silko is more interested in the landscape of the Tucson Mountains and the way clouds form to sometimes drop rain than she is in making sense of her own history -- and that is much of this unusual memoir's appeal.

"He'd felt safer in the desert than he ever had in his life, as if some outside force were protecting him. But now, in the bowels of the city, he was a stationary target."

That's Tucson in the 1980s, a city of snowbirds, developers and perky undergraduates, in a desert crossed with dry washes that can turn murderous in a moment.

Aaron Michael Morales, who was born and raised in Tucson, writes about the southern Arizona city and its surrounding landscape with such precision that it's sometimes hard to remember that Drowning Tucson is a work of fiction. Through the lives of intertwining characters -- including an Air Force officer, Latin King gang members, a prostitute, a kidnapped child and a young gay man whose lover has been murdered -- the author explores emotions that most of us would rather ignore. Time and again, Morales reminds us that in geographies more complex than Hollywood or Hallmark, passion is rarely synonymous with love.

This is not an easy book to read: Morales tears his characters apart and puts their seething grief on display, and sometimes it's a grief too heavy to bear. In real life we often turn a blind eye to brutality and injustice, but it's impossible to glance away from Morales's novel. It becomes necessary to follow the threads of the lives that he weaves together -- necessary to know what will happen to these people, trapped in their darkness and crippling desire.

Morales drowns his readers as well as the city, but the sensation feels less like a loss of consciousness than a sudden awakening. Only after finishing the last sentence is it possible to exhale.

More than four decades ago, the Hopi and Navajo tribal councils sold 65,000 acres of coal rights to what was then called Peabody Western Coal. The Black Mesa deal, engineered by a former U.S. attorney who represented the Hopi while working for Peabody on the sly, brought hundreds of jobs to northeastern Arizona. It also forced the relocation of some 10,000 people from land slated for the strip mine. Families and clans were split and relations between the two tribes strained. Starting in 1970, the mine began pumping more than 4,000 acre-feet of groundwater annually to send coal slurry 273 miles via pipeline to the Mohave Generating Station, dropping the Navajo aquifer and drying up local wells.

Though the Black Mesa Mine closed in 2005, its associated Kayenta Mine still sends coal to the Navajo Generating Station on the reservation near Page, Ariz. In addition to this and the open pit Navajo coal mine, the reservation hosts two of the region's three coal plants. The tribe owns none of these facilities, and though it receives royalties and tax revenue, it has no say in how they do business.

"Past development in Indian Country was the old formula where companies came in and built projects, but only leased the land and did not include the tribe as equity partners," says David Lester, a member of the Muscogee Creek Tribe and the executive director of the Denver-based Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT). "That old paradigm left us with all the social and environmental costs and none of the economic benefits."

Given this history, it's no wonder the Navajo Nation, like many tribes, has tried to take control of resource development on its own land. The tribe's Desert Rock coal plant was conceived to do just that. In 2003, the Diné Power Authority, created by the tribal council to develop the tribe's energy resources, announced that the 1,500-megawatt facility would be built by the German company Steag Power (acquired the following year by Sithe Global Power) on Navajo land about 25 miles outside of Farmington, N.M. The tribe itself would own up to a half stake, exploit its large coal reserves, and, when the plant was finished as projected in 2005, send electricity off to markets with its own 500 kilovolt transmission line, which has been in the works since the 1990s.

Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. hailed the project as an economic victory for the poverty-stricken reservation, where the unemployment rate ranges from 44 to 66 percent. Desert Rock would mean not only jobs -- 200 in BHP Billiton's expanded Navajo Mine as well as 1,000 construction jobs and 400 operation jobs for the plant itself -- but also $50 million in annual revenue.

At the time it was proposed, the plant seemed to have a solid foundation: The economy was swinging back from a mild recession, real estate was hot and construction was booming, especially in the Southwest and California. To keep pace with a projected doubling in electricity demand, the International Energy Agency called for $1.6 trillion in energy investment through 2030 in Canada and the United States. Regulatory agencies were generally more permissive, and Congress was nowhere near to passing legislation to rein in carbon emissions, while the Bush White House was refusing to acknowledge climate change. Yet despite the tribe's optimism, a closer look at how it and its partners went about obtaining permits and securing funds shows that Desert Rock always rested upon shaky ground. This March, after seven years of planning and with millions of dollars poured into attorneys, consultants and travel junkets, Sithe Global not only delayed the project once again -- beyond 2015 this time -- but said it is considering changing it extensively. In June, the company gave up the only funding it had secured for construction of the project, when it allowed a $3.2 billion industrial revenue bond and tax break from San Juan County, N.M., to expire. And now, with its champion Shirley stepping down because of term limits this fall, Desert Rock's days are likely numbered.

From the get-go, the Navajo tribal government's approach did little to reassure community members that Desert Rock would be different from past projects involving outside companies. To get the land for the plant, for example, the government paid elderly shepherds to sign over their grazing allotments without telling them what the land would be used for. (The tribe needed their permission because reservation land is held in trust for the Navajo by the United States government.) "They would bring a bag of groceries and tell them they would get a thousand dollars," says Lori Goodman of Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, or Diné CARE, a Navajo nonprofit formed in the 1980s to fight construction of a toxic waste incinerator and dump. "People told us they were harassed to the point where they got fed up and said, 'We'll sign whatever just to get you out of our face.' "

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The move alienated many in the Burnham Chapter -- one of 110 local government subdivisions on the reservation -- where the plant would be located, and soon after Desert Rock went public, Burnham's members defeated a resolution to support the plant. Undeterred, the tribal government adjusted chapter boundaries, pushing Desert Rock onto the neighboring Nenahnezad Chapter, which then passed a resolution supporting it. "That was how it started," says Goodman. "And it's been like that ever since."

So Diné CARE began spreading the word that many Navajo people oppose Desert Rock. Along with the resistance group Dooda ("absolutely not") Desert Rock, elders and families also began to demonstrate against the plant, organizing blockades against Sithe and occupying a makeshift protest camp at the plant's site.

Meanwhile, the Four Corners-area nonprofit San Juan Citizens Alliance took notice of the project, and the organization's New Mexico energy coordinator, Mike Eisenfeld, began poring over regulatory documents, e-mail messages and meeting notes obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In 2006, when the project's lobbyists began seeking tax relief from the New Mexico Legislature, claiming that it was necessary to make Desert Rock economically viable, Eisenfeld was there. "When (lobbyist Dick) Minzer was asked if they had their permits, he said, 'Yes,' " says Eisenfeld with a shake of his head. "And we're in the back" -- he raises his hand -- "saying, 'No!'"

For three years running, the Legislature denied the lobbyists' requests, in large part because of the proposed plant's environmental impact on the state, says state Sen. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe. Even so, opposition to the plant came almost entirely from the three grassroots groups. New Mexico's congressional delegation either supported the project, as with now-retired Sen. Pete Domenici, R, or deferred to tribal sovereignty, as with Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D. And Sen. Tom Udall, D, formerly a U.S. representative, has consistently said Desert Rock would mean much-needed economic development for the Navajo. It wasn't until five years into the project's planning that the state of New Mexico itself stepped directly into the fray.

In July 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that Desert Rock would not worsen pollution in the Four Corners region and issued it a key air-quality permit. Three months later, New Mexico joined environmental groups in appealing the decision. The state contended that the EPA failed to consider how Desert Rock would affect visibility within nearby national parks and failed to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on how the plant's emissions might increase water-borne levels of mercury and selenium and affect two endangered fish in the San Juan River. The state also asked the agency to consider evidence it had previously ignored -- that regional ozone pollution levels exceeded federal health-based air quality standards even without Desert Rock, which would add not only ozone and greenhouse gas emissions, but also mercury, sulfates, nitrates, carbon monoxide and both fine and large particulate matter. The region already hosts three coal plants, including the 1,800-megawatt San Juan Generating Station and the 2,200-megawatt Four Corners plant, as well as tens of thousands of oil and gas wells.

As a result of the appeal, the EPA announced it was reconsidering portions of the air permit in early 2009. Nine months later, it reversed its Bush-era decision entirely -- in part because the permit lacked emission limitations for carbon dioxide. Developers had also had failed to complete a required consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the two endangered fish. Shortly after that, the Bureau of Indian Affairs withdrew its biological opinion in support of the plant, acknowledging that Fish and Wildlife had "significant concerns" about the impact of the plant's potential mercury and selenium discharges on the San Juan River's fish. Without that document, the project's environmental impact statement remains incomplete. And without that, most other permits -- for mine expansion to feed the plant as well as the plant itself -- are impossible to obtain.

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Even as Desert Rock's developers have struggled with permits and tax breaks, electricity markets have changed significantly. Initially, developers looked to California. But after that state's Public Utility Commission essentially banned new contracts for electricity from coal-fired power plants in early 2007 -- requiring utilities to generate or purchase power with emissions comparable to or lower than modern natural gas facilities, which emit about half the carbon emissions of coal -- developers turned to the interior Southwest. In Desert Rock's June 2007 draft environmental impact statement, Sithe listed seven of the region's utilities, all of which were projected to need new power, as potential customers.

Now, however, not one of those utilities plans to seek electricity from new coal plants. Although he's optimistic about the future of "clean coal" and the eventual development of new carbon-capturing technology, Resource Planning Manager John Coggins of the Salt River Project sums up the utilities' current viewpoint: Until it's certain how carbon emissions will be regulated and there's a commercially viable way to capture and store carbon, the Salt River Project, which serves the Phoenix area, has no intention of buying new coal power. In addition to the EPA's recent ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases should be considered pollutants, the agency has proposed new air-quality standards for smog, which, if implemented, will affect everything from the transportation sector to factories and power plants.

Securing funds for the ever-more-expensive Desert Rock, even from the Navajo Nation itself, has also proved difficult for Sithe. In 2003, when the project was projected to cost $1.5 billion, the Nation was expected to pay between 25 and 49 percent of construction costs. Now, with estimated costs exceeding $4 billion, President Shirley's spokesman, George Hardeen, says that Sithe will have to foot the entire bill. In fact, the tribal council has yet to actually approve investment in the project. Within the agreement that the Diné Power Authority drew up between Sithe and the tribe, DPA's project administrator Ben Hoisington says the Navajo Nation still has the option to buy into Desert Rock and be a partner in the project. The DPA is working with the tribal council's oversight committee and investment committee on the deal. "We are just trying to fine-tune it," he adds. "But we have to get the permitting done before we can make any commitments."

The tribe and Sithe have also failed to obtain federal money. In 2005, the Bush administration denied Shirley's request for a $1 billion loan; three years later, the Obama-Biden Transition Team denied a $2.9 billion request to help fund carbon capture and sequestration at the site. A June 2009 application to the U.S. Department of Energy's Clean Coal Power Initiative was also denied.

Some tribal officials -- including CERT's Lester and DPA's Hoisington -- say the federal government is unfairly denying Indian projects. But there are significant discrepancies between the reality of the project and the words in the clean-power initiative application. Sithe insists, for example, that the project is supported by the host community as well as the Navajo tribal government -- and that the project is in "very advanced stages of development," despite lacking all of its permits.

This isn't the first time the Navajo Nation has stumbled while trying to develop its own energy resources. Since it was founded in 1985, the Diné Power Authority has yet to develop a single energy project. Even the project that spurred the authority's creation in the mid-1980s -- the Paragon Ranch coal-fired plant planned for reservation land north of Crownpoint -- never came to fruition. "In '92, things went toward natural gas," says Hoisington, "and the plant was not feasible." At that point, the authority directed its efforts toward the Navajo Transmission Project, which would run from the reservation in northwestern New Mexico some 400 miles to Nevada. But more than two decades into the project's planning process, it also remains theoretical.

In March, 2009, the Department of the Interior remanded the power line's environmental impact statement after environmental groups sued, arguing that the analysis -- completed in 1996 -- did not consider the greenhouse gas emissions or the environmental and health impacts from the coal plant it would likely serve: Desert Rock. On top of that, the project's only permit, for a segment of the line's location Arizona, will expire this October.

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In the past, some Navajo Council delegates have complained about the authority's lack of results. In response, in 2003, the tribe's Office of Management and Budget prepared a report, questioning the authority's funding and its timelines for projects. Between 1990 and 2003, it found, the tribe had given DPA $9,373,381 "for the transmission project with no return to the nation." Diné CARE's Goodman estimates that the tribal council has allocated $20 million to the authority since 1990. OMB executive director Dominic Beyal agrees that Goodman is close.

According to Hoisington, DPA has a staff of eight, and its budget goes mostly toward travel. "With delays in the (power plant) project, we have to have meetings not only regionally, but on a national level," he says. "We do a lot of presentations ... and we have to use consultants to help us move forward with the project, legally, environmentally and engineering-wise."

He also says that the power authority has put some of the $20 million toward the transmission line's Environmental Impact Statement and "other studies" to determine which route would have the least impact. But those studies would have been paid for by the developers funding the projects, including Trans-Elect, an early investor in the transmission line, and Sithe. Unfortunately, it's impossible to say definitively how DPA has spent its money: Tribal governments are not obligated to comply with open-records laws.

Through most of the challenges, President Shirley's office has firmly maintained that Desert Rock is still a go, and Sithe and its public relations team have agreed. But early this year, the company pulled back from plans for two of its three coal-fired power proposals in the United States. In February, it abandoned a 300-megawatt waste-coal plant in Pennsylvania. In March, it transformed plans for its Toquop Energy Project near Mesquite, Nev., into a 700-megawatt natural gas plant with a 100-megawatt solar component.

Shortly after, Sithe Executive Vice President Dirk Straussfeld admitted that the company is also actively reviewing Desert Rock to take into account economic and regulatory changes. The company is in discussion with utilities to learn what types of power resources they are seeking for the future: Desert Rock can only go forward if it has customers. Essentially, everything is on the table, he says, including perhaps the plant's design. "There is no need in 2015 for this, so it might be delayed," Straussfeld says, adding that Sithe has no plans to resubmit its air-permit application to the EPA.

Steven Begay, general manager of the Dine Power Authority, has insisted the tribe will find a new company if Sithe balks. "Desert Rock is still on track," says presidential spokesman George Hardeen. "It's going to provide jobs that are needed on Navajo -- people are getting poorer, and Navajos want jobs."

But it's clear the tribal government is becoming increasingly desperate. For years, in response to environmentalists' lawsuit over the Navajo transmission line's environmental analysis, the tribe and project proponents claimed that the line and Desert Rock were two separate endeavors. Now, however, they say that building Desert Rock and the transmission line together is the only way the tribe can develop and market its renewable energy resources.

"The Desert Rock power plant is a keystone to building the capacity for tribal energy to be developed in a win-win scenario," says CERT's Lester. It's the lack of transmission that thwarts full development of renewable resources on the Navajo, Hopi and Hualapai reservations, he says. The nation is dotted with orphaned wind-farm proposals -- only a large-scale coal or natural gas plants can justify something as expensive as a 500-kilovolt line. "If we want the vast solar resources of the Colorado Plateau to be developed, we've got to have a transmission line," he says. "And Desert Rock would provide that transmission line."

Even if Lester is right, Desert Rock as coal plant looks to be on its deathbed. Its biggest proponent is on his way out of power. In July, Shirley lost a court bid to throw out term limits so he could run again this fall. And though the project probably won’t be a major issue in the election, neither candidate vying to replace Shirley overtly supports Desert Rock in its current form. The Navajo primary winner, state Sen. Lynda Lovejoy, says Sithe needs to deal with local concerns about how the 1,500 megawatt plant would deplete water supplies and affect air quality. The company also needs to commit to employing Navajos and training them to take on administrative and managerial jobs, she adds, and to the long-term well-being of the tribe. Although she suggests that a smaller megawatt plant might be a better fit for the tribe, Lovejoy says she’d most like to see the company agree to give more financial control over and more financial return from the project to the Navajo. But with no commitment from the tribal council to actually invest in the plant’s construction, that seems unrealistic.

For his part, Lovejoy's opponent, current Navajo Vice President Ben Shelly, actively opposes Desert Rock and has called the project “foolish.” “There is no hope of getting that particular power plant going under President Obama,” he says. Throw in roadblocks from the EPA and other federal agencies, as well as the state’s staunch opposition, he adds, and “there is no hope that we know of that it will be built.” In other words, says Shelly, it’s time to move on. “By saying no to Desert Rock,” he says, “maybe we can focus on other sources of power.”

]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry2010/08/13 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDueling Claimshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.21/dueling-claims
A tribal attempt to protect New Mexico's Mount Taylor sparks a bitter struggle over uranium mining, religious differences and claims to an ancient landscape.Over the course of 10 days last June, at least five Navajo men were brutally beaten in Grants, N.M. The attackers, described by some of the victims as "Mexicans," used rocks and baseball bats, ambushing one man with a pellet gun and hitting another with a brass-knuckle-handled knife. One victim -- who was found in an abandoned house, covered in dried blood and insects -- was airlifted to an Albuquerque hospital.

None of the victims lived in town, although they have homes and families on the nearby Navajo Reservation. As word of the attacks spread, the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission broadcast public service announcements on the radio, urging Navajos to track down missing family members and make sure they were OK.

At first, the five victims, and two others who had not gone to the police, hesitated to talk. Some feared retaliation; others had had previous run-ins with the law. But with the human rights commission there to overcome the language barrier, the police uncovered some troubling clues. One of the men heard his attacker yell something to the effect of, "You got Mount Taylor, now you're mine."

Mount Taylor -- a dormant volcano northeast of the town -- is sacred to at least five Southwestern tribes, including the Navajo. Its lower reaches also host uranium ore, and the Grants Mineral Belt supported active mines from the 1950s through the 1980s, when mines were shuttered and mills demolished. But when uranium prices began climbing again, companies snatched up old leases and claims. Now, some are drilling exploration wells, and a few are planning new mines. This has kindled economic hope in struggling nearby towns like Grants and Milan. Some locals, however, recall a tragic history of environmental contamination and radiation illness and want nothing to do with yellowcake.

Just three days before the beatings began, the state of New Mexico had decided to place Mount Taylor and some of its surrounding lands on the State Register of Cultural Properties as a traditional cultural property, or TCP. The decision ended a 16-month-long process that became a battle pitting Native Americans and environmentalists against mining companies, Anglo ranchers and Spanish land grant communities. The new TCP covers 400,000 acres -- an unprecedented size -- and many locals worried that it would prevent uranium development and even restrict use of the mountain by anyone not Native American.

Then, at the end of June, police apprehended one of the alleged attackers: 22-year old Shawn Longoria was charged with six counts of aggravated battery as well as robbery and aggravated burglary -- all felony charges. Local TV and print reports noted that an anonymous caller had told officers that Longoria boasted of beating up the men "because the Native Americans had got Mount Taylor and now they owed him."

With several unidentified assailants still at large, it's impossible to know exactly why the Navajos were attacked; the connection between Mount Taylor and the beatings is tenuous. But what's clear is that the tribes' attempt to protect the mountain tapped into a dark reservoir of old tensions that underlies this busted boomtown.

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From the top of Mount Taylor, mountains, valleys and mesas unfold into the hazy blue distance; on clear days, you can see all the way to Arizona. The Navajo call the 11,301-foot-tall peak Tsoodzil, and say it marks one of the four directional boundaries of their spiritual world. The Acoma, who call it Kaweshtima, believe it was created by two sisters who also gave life to plants and animals; it's still home to beings such as Shakak, the Spirit of Winter and the North. To the Zuni, the mountain is Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalannee.

"People may think it's just a physical entity, that it sits there, and Zunis or Acomas or others, they only go there sometimes," says Jim Enote, executive director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center at Zuni. "But people only go to Mecca once in their life, or Mount Sinai once in their life, or the Vatican once in their life."

The mountain is sacred, he says, home to shrines and a place for gathering certain plants and minerals. "It is extremely important, and the people who go to Mount Taylor, to Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanee, are doing so to help maintain an entire cosmological process," he says. "They are doing it for the benefit of all humanity."

So, two years ago, the Zuni joined the pueblos of Acoma and Laguna, Arizona's Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation in asking the state of New Mexico to protect this hodgepodge of federal, state and private lands as a traditional cultural property.

The tribes were seeking official acknowledgement of their stake in the development of their sacred lands, particularly when it comes to the state's authority to issue uranium-mining permits. The uranium boom supported Grants and Milan from the 1950s through the 1980s, but it also left a legacy of contaminated waters and sickened workers. And the mills have proven particularly problematic: Despite more than two decades of cleanup work, contamination from the Homestake Mining Company mill site in Milan, just west of Grants, has spread to five aquifers.

The TCP designation seemed like the best way to protect the mountain because it doesn't restrict public access, says Theresa Pasqual, historic preservation officer for Acoma Pueblo, the lead sponsor. The mountain remains open for everything from grazing and wood-gathering to hiking, snowmobiling and mountain biking. Under the TCP designation, the state's Historic Preservation Division -- and its mining division -- are required to review permit requests for development on Mount Taylor. It also requires that developers consult with tribes during the permitting process. It does not, however, afford tribes veto power over projects. Final decision-making remains with the state and the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees most of the mountain's acreage. Under the law, TCPs -- or any other protected property, including archaeological sites or historical buildings -- can even be destroyed if development is in the public's best interest. Pasqual says that the tribes chose this option knowing full well that it didn't guarantee protection.

Even so, the proposal didn't sit right with many local landowners. It violates private property rights, says Joy Burns, whose family has been running cattle on Mount Taylor for generations. Today, her family's Elkins Ranch spreads across some 16,000 acres on the east side of the mountain, right below the summit --smack-dab within the TCP's boundaries. "If I file the necessary papers and get the necessary permits, I don't think that any group should be able to tell us about my property," she says. The issue of uranium mining aside, she fears the designation will affect her family's ability to log or hunt on their own lands. It's not fair, she says.

Indeed, as the process moved along, it started rumors of a "land grab." Tempers began to simmer. Then, into the midst of this growing furor, stepped a Christian self-help author who promotes energy development in the name of the Lord.

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In early 2008, the five tribes submitted paperwork asking the state to consider temporary protection for Mount Taylor. The request became public a few weeks later, on Feb. 22. At an emergency meeting, the New Mexico Cultural Properties Review Committee announced that it would protect the mountain for one year while considering whether it merited permanent status as a protected traditional cultural property. The uranium industry, local landowners and the surrounding communities felt blindsided.

Marita Noon, who is executive director of the nonprofit Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE), attended that first meeting. "There were a bevy of (uranium company) attorneys who were against the TCP decision, who are normally articulate and able to present their case, and they were basically just begging for a two-week delay so that they could read the TCP nomination -- because no one had seen it," she says. "Then, you have Native Americans -- I may sound racist, but I don't mean to be -- but they are not the people who are naturally public speakers; they don't have a lot of experience at putting their thoughts together and articulating them. But they stood up with prepared, written-out statements." Something, she says, was fishy, and when the committee did not grant a two-week extension, Noon took up the cause with a vengeance. She left the meeting "outraged by the sham of democracy" she had witnessed. After a sleepless night, she pounded out the first of many op-eds.

Noon, an ebullient woman with fluffy blonde hair, is a popular speaker and the author of 19 books on Christianity and relationships under the pen name Marita Littauer, including The Praying Wives Club, Talking So People Will Listen and Tailor-Made Marriage. Her organization, CARE, seeks to communicate "the positive side of the energy industry to the media and the public." Founded by Mark Mathis, a consultant to the Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, it receives funding from oil and gas producers. The Albuquerque Journal frequently runs Noon's commentaries calling for the elimination of the state's Oil Conservation Division or dismissing the creation of green jobs as "happy talk."

Noon lacks a professional background in energy issues or science. "But as I've learned and understood the issue, it has clearly become a passion for me," she says. "And I really have studied the issue: That everything we hold dear in America is threatened by threats to energy."

She claims that 90 percent of the uranium currently used in the U.S. is imported, most of it from Russia -- "an increasingly unfriendly Russia," at that. That's why it's so important for mining to proceed near Grants, she says in her speeches. "When we have sources to get the base fuel supplies in America, why on earth are we giving our money to foreign countries?"

The TCP designation may not totally block uranium mining, but, she argues, it adds an extra layer of regulation that has driven some companies out. And the people of Grants, which she compares to a Third World country, can't afford to lose this chance for economic development.

Noon has a knack for galvanizing crowds, but her rhetoric has a tendency to be somewhat loose with the facts. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, for example, 86 percent of the uranium used in the U.S. is indeed imported. But nearly half of that, comes from Australia and Canada, while 33 percent comes from Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan. The Farmington Daily Times and the blog Heath Haussamen on New Mexico Politics have recently pulled Noon's commentaries, citing inaccuracies.

In the case of the TCP, though, Noon didn't need to twist the facts to win people to her cause. The state had botched the process badly enough to help do the job for her.

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Three months after the February meeting, the New Mexico attorney general's office announced that the state's Office of Cultural Affairs had failed to adequately notify nearby private property owners about the meeting, although it did provide proper notice in the media. The meeting -- and by default, the designation -- had therefore violated the state's Open Meetings Act.

The Historic Preservation Division scheduled a new meeting for June 14, 2008, at Grants High School. By then, both sides were up to speed on the proposal. But rumors about everything from the number of acres involved to how the designation might affect local land-users were stoking anger and suspicion. The state police attended the meeting; officers from local departments came as well.

When the day came, protesters gathered with hand-lettered signs bearing slogans that ranged from "Mount Taylor is public land, not reservation" to "Save Our Sacred Mountain."

Following a Cibola County commissioners meeting in April, the governor of Zuni Pueblo, Norman Cooeyate, and the governor of Laguna had written to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, requesting a neutral location for the meeting due to the "level of hostility and potential air of racism experienced by our council/community members and as exhibited by local community members of Grants and Milan."

But that request was denied. And as an estimated 700 people filed into the gymnasium and took seats in facing bleachers, the divisions became all too clear: There was "an eerie sense of cowboys and Indians facing off," Gallup Independent reporter Helen Davis wrote, "because many Native observers wore traditional clothing and cowboy hats dominated head gear in the stands across the gym." Those were the "pro-uranium people," says Cooeyate. "And you had all the people who were against uranium on the other side -- and that included a lot of what we call ourselves, the brown faces."

As the five hours of testimony unfolded, opponents repeatedly disrupted statements by Native Americans, Cooeyate says. "They jeered, they sneered, they booed every time there was a comment that was made from the tribal leadership or any of the people that supported us."

But other locals complained that the state was giving Native Americans preferential treatment. Opponents also criticized the involvement of environmental groups, saying it proved that the tribes were using religion and tradition to block mining altogether. They expressed fears that the tribes were trying to take over public lands.

After the meeting, Cooeyate says, some TCP opponents yelled obscenities at tribal elders in the parking lot.

As the final meeting -- set for May 15, 2009, in Santa Fe -- approached, even the all-weather notebook at the summit of Mount Taylor reflected community anxiety. Many of the comments simply described trips up the mountain -- JR and Douglas cleared trees off the trail while riding their Arctic Cat 700 ATVs, folks on New Year's Eve braved the wind, and one man and his 6-year-old son took six hours and 13 minutes to snowshoe up the trail in March. Others, however, denounced the designation. "TCP still sucks, mountain belongs to us all, not just the Indians," was not an uncommon sentiment.

----

Native Americans may have staked a claim to Mount Taylor, but the mesas and canyons below it have long been home to Spanish communities, as well. Throughout New Mexico, parcels of land were granted to Spanish individuals and communities as far back as 1598; they were recognized by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and by Congress in the 19th century. Many of these remain community lands, although others have been privatized and incorporated.

On the Juan Tafoya Land Grant east of Grants, life has been bleak since the local uranium mine and mill closed. Ranching and farming no longer sustain families, and young people lack opportunities.

Some 15 families still live part-time in Marquez, a village in Juan Tafoya that no longer hosts its own post office. The nearest schools are 40 miles away on the Laguna Reservation. Life is difficult; James Martinez, one of the village's four full-time residents, spends two days a week in Albuquerque, seeking more lucrative work than ranching.

Though uranium prices are still fluctuating -- at $43 per pound as of Nov. 23, they're down from last year's $55 -- they're far above the $7 per pound they hit in 1991. And with the nuclear power industry poised to profit from federal climate-change policy, Martinez believes a mining resurgence could provide new opportunities for local young people. Uranium, after all, supported his father, who lived in Marquez until his death at 78.

For its part, the uranium industry is showing interest. Neutron Energy -- the company nearest to getting development under way in the area -- hopes to begin exploration at its Marquez Canyon Mine site on the Juan Tafoya, which is now a privatized corporation. The high-quality ore there is still mostly untouched, though the Tennessee Valley Authority, Kerr McGee and Exxon sank some 700 exploratory holes before the bust.

The industry isn't a threat, Martinez says, because the people here are good stewards of the land. He disputes the notion that Native Americans are the only ones with deep spiritual ties to the region. His family has lived on this land grant for eight or nine generations -- more than 300 years. "We have saints in the area," he says, "and my great-great-grandfather was born in the caves right below Mount Taylor, in Canon de Marquez. My father, and his father, distilled in us: Protect what you have. But also make it grow and prosper from what you have. We have some common sense, we will not let our stuff get destroyed." Today, his 20-year-old son, Amadeo Martinez, still runs cattle on the land grant. One of the last children baptized at the Catholic church in Marquez, he is majoring in earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico and hopes to work in the mining industry.

The younger Martinez has a Native American girlfriend and believes the return of mining could actually heal some of the divisions that were so starkly revealed at the Grants meeting. The Marquez Mine proposal lies outside the TCP, after all: "When our people open the mine, it will provide jobs for their people." And then, he says, they can become a united community, rather than two cultures.

But here, too -- outside the TCP boundary -- mining has torn a deep rift. Worried that the mine will contaminate groundwater and harm culturally significant springs, the Pueblo of Acoma opposes the project.

During a November 2008 public hearing for Neutron's exploration permit, some of the crowd erupted again, recalls New Mexico Environmental Law Center attorney Eric Jantz, who has been working with the Acomas. "There's an element, I think, of revisionist history: One of the land grant people made a public comment to the effect that they were there first, and the tribal folks had no right," he says. "Then there were a number of Anglo ranchers who got up and testified, pretty angrily, about how their property rights were being infringed upon in various ways, and if there were minerals or any things that could make them money off their land, then they ought to have the right to exploit those resources without any government interference."

And then Marita Noon took the microphone. God placed mineral wealth under the earth for us to use, she preached, and the tribes were getting in the way of America's greatness by forcing us to rely on imported energy, including uranium from Russia. "That," says Jantz, "turned things particularly ugly."

----

Marquez is unique for its long history and geographic isolation, but the town of Grants has also seen better days. Double-stacked trains tear through town, barely slowing. A few modern motels greet travelers pulling off the highway for the night, but the road into downtown hosts a string of shuttered motor lodges -- the Franciscan, the Desert Sun, the Wayside -- with cracked doors and weedy lots. Streets and sewers are crumbling as the tax base shrinks, and the town now relies on prisons, including the Cibola County Detention Center and the state women's correctional facility.

Visitors to the mining museum can ride an elevator underground to a mock uranium mineshaft, but there's little else to explore within the town itself. There is, in fact, little in Grants to conjure even a whiff of nostalgia for those boom days. Grants never truly built itself up in the first place, and like Marquez, it has never recovered from the bust.

George Byers, vice president of Neutron Energy, believes all that could change. In addition to the Marquez Mine site, Neutron has acquired leases on the Cebolleta Land Grant on the east side of Mount Taylor and on private lands west of it, all in the last few years. The Marquez Mine alone could bring more than 225 jobs to Grants, Byers says, while a complete resurgence of the industry in the area could create about 8,000 jobs, with an economic impact of about a billion dollars.

Byers' company fought the TCP designation, testifying in 2008 that the emergency listing was unwarranted, given the fact that there were no immediate plans for mining within its boundaries. Most of his company's plans are slated for private land, including Spanish land grants.

And although he now says the designation shouldn't affect Neutron's plans, it does add another layer of regulation and consultation. "Instead of getting a permit to do exploration in several weeks -- which you can do in any other state -- on private land, it took us over 14 months" for the Marquez site, he says. "That was unnecessary. It wasted a lot of time, it wasted a lot of money."

Before the TCP designation, most projects were able to go through a streamlined "minimal impact" permit process, explains New Mexico Mining and Minerals Division director Bill Brancard. Now, projects -- even those on private lands -- within the TCP boundary no longer qualify for that. Instead, they must undergo the regular exploration permitting process, which takes longer.

For the most part, however, the designation changes little because almost all the projects are planned for U.S. Forest Service lands. The state's TCP process was more controversial because it became public first, says Brancard, but the Forest Service was already planning to add its Mount Taylor lands to the National Register of Historic Places. Now, any projects proposed for those federal lands must undergo a thorough environmental impact analysis.

Ultimately, though, despite all the fuss, it may not matter what kind of designation the mountain receives.

Companies are "proceeding fairly deliberately because New Mexico has some real pluses and minuses when it comes to uranium mining," says Brancard. The resources are here, he says, but developing them would require significant front-end investments. Most importantly, someone would need to build a mill -- an expensive commitment that no one appears willing to make at this point.

----

Before the final TCP hearing in May 2009, the state prepared for controversy. Gov. Richardson's director of policy and issues, Bill Hume, sent an e-mail to the Historic Preservation Division, suggesting consultation with the secretary of New Mexico's Department of Public Safety: "I expect a comfortable -- but not oppressive -- showing of uniformed officers at the hearing would be appropriate," he wrote, "with possibly some reinforcements stashed out of sight nearby."

But the meeting went off without a hitch, and on June 5, 2009, the state announced that Mount Taylor had received permanent designation as a traditional cultural property. Some 89,000 acres of private lands within the boundary were exempted from protection. Still, the contentious process had left open wounds. In October, some local landowners and uranium mining companies -- including RayEllen Resources, Rio Grande Resources Corporation, Strathmore Resources, Laramide Resources, Roca Honda Resources and the Cebolleta Land Grant -- filed a legal challenge to the mountain's protected status. "The grounds are basically due process," says attorney Jon Indall. "It's not an appeal on whether they're cultural or not -- it's an appeal on the process that was undertaken to get there."

The suit came as a surprise to designation supporters. The tribes had expected opposition, but few TCP supporters anticipated how emotional and even hysterical things would become. Certainly no one could have guessed that the process would be implicated in the spate of violence against Navajos.

The June beatings prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to open a hate crimes investigation. But even on the surface, the situation was far from cut and dry. "We have Native blood in us," Longoria's mother told television news crews as she joined friends and family to protest outside the Cibola County Judicial Complex. "The fight was not racist-based."

The Grants Police Station resembles a strip mall and lies just off the road that leads from Grants to Mount Taylor. On a crystalline day in September, Grants Police Chief Steve Sena -- stocky, with a neat mustache and clean-shaven head -- talks about the beatings. Although the FBI investigation is ongoing, Sena says his department has determined that Longoria's actions were not racially motivated. They were "an act of stupidity," he says, that is all. Sena, who has more than two decades on the force, doesn't believe that the violence in his town was related to the TCP designation and the controversy that followed. Media hype and suggestions to the contrary don't help: "It's been very hurtful," he says, "very hurtful to the community."

Despite Sena's certainty, distrust remains. Some fault the tribes for seeking to protect Mount Taylor, while others blame an industry that never atoned for the sins of its past. And many locals say outsiders were responsible for the blow-ups, whether environmentalists or industry boosters like Marita Noon. But history has shown that life is seldom easy in a place like Grants, where four Indian reservations bump up against Spanish land grants and Anglo ranching towns. Old communities have long memories, and grudges are often passed down through the generations.

Violence is not unusual in the Southwest's reservation border towns. In the 1970s, Farmington, N.M., a community on the edge of the Navajo Nation, earned the moniker "the Selma, Ala., of the Southwest" after three white teenagers charged with beating three Navajos to death were sent to reform school instead of prison. Though things have vastly improved since then, the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission -- which was founded, with the 1970s beatings in mind, after the fatal shooting of a Navajo man by a white Farmington police officer in June 2006 -- stays busy, tracking discrimination and organizing public hearings. At the same time, it tries to reach out to local police departments, as it did following last June's beatings.

The media's interest in the beatings may have faded, but the communities are left to grapple not only with the stigma of border-town violence, but also the cultural divisions so clearly and painfully revealed. The TCP process was clearly botched -- throughout the entire series of meetings, the state repeatedly fumbled or passed up opportunities to educate the public and keep the lines of communication open. Yet despite everything, Mount Taylor also offers an opportunity. The struggle has forced the communities to face their history -- their intertwined cultural heritage as well as their economic and environmental legacies -- giving them a chance to work together to decide what the future holds.

Outside Sena's office, officers take turns meeting with a Hispanic woman who has come to talk about her daughter's problems with other kids at the high school. A tall young Native American officer stands before the woman, who sits with her daughter and mother. As she talks about the problems, about her neighborhood, he murmurs in understanding and reminds her to remain respectful and calm, even in the face of threats of violence from the other family. If she stoops to their level, he says, she will be accused of escalating the situation. After a while, Sena comes out and, with words punctuated by easy smiles, reassures her. Everything, he says, is going to be fine.

Laura Paskus is a freelance writer and a former HCN editor. You can also listen to her audio interview about this story.

This story was funded by grants from the McCune Charitable Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

]]>No publisherCommunities2009/12/02 06:00:00 GMT-6Article'Yes' to desire and an end to fearhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.19/yes-to-desire-and-an-end-to-fear
Charles Bowden's new book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, reiterates the bad news of today but declares that times are changing.Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the FutureCharles Bowden243 pages, hardcover, $24.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

But as a desert man, I can only say yes to rain. -- Charles Bowden

Mulling over decades spent reporting on everything from border crimes to environmental destruction to post-Katrina New Orleans, journalist Charles Bowden declares an end to the way things have been.

Neither cynical nor hysterical, Bowden's latest book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, reiterates that the climate is changing, human populations are taxing the natural world beyond endurance and greater storms are undoubtedly brewing. Such is the world we now inhabit, and we should no longer imagine that we can return to a post-World War II American idyll. It is time to stare down this new world and accept our place within it. "The real history and revolution is taking place all around us," he says, even as we refuse to acknowledge it. "I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror," he writes. "The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time." Bowden does not share that fear, however. Instead, he reminds us that only by saying yes -- to action and desire -- can we dissipate our pointless, paralyzing dread.

This is not the book for newcomers to Bowden. Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing is for readers already accustomed to his complex, emotional style, who trust that his tangents will lead someplace relevant and that he isn't rending our hearts merely for effect. Despite his melancholy tone -- obsessing over everything from women murdered in Mexico to the depletion of desert groundwater -- Bowden still seems to view the world through unclouded eyes.

This latest book leaves readers acutely aware of Bowden's own sense of mortality. His books are always personal -- too personal if you're not interested in the man's love life or other entanglements -- but this one reads as intimately as a letter to all those who have read his words for years and nodded in understanding. It may seem pointless to mourn the still-living, but as the author himself acknowledges, everything changes, and all things come to an end.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBooks2009/11/09 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleConservation's First Lady http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.12/conservations-first-lady
A fiery environmentalist is fondly remembered in Dyana Furmansky's biography, Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who saved Nature from the Conservationists. "Fancy how I trembled."

That was activist Rosalie Edge's tongue-in-cheek response to an incident in the 1930s, when an Audubon Society attorney accused her of being a "common scold." A thorn in the conservation organization's side for decades, Edge badgered board members and directors for bowing to sportsmen's influence and ignoring dissenting voices.

Although her name is unfamiliar to most, Edge's legacy pervades today's environmental movement. A New York socialite sparked to action after reading a 1929 paper, "A Crisis in Conservation" -- in which three scientists criticized environmental organizations for not halting the "annihilation" of species -- Edge fought to protect hawk habitat in Pennsylvania and set aside national parks in California and Washington. She influenced the Sierra Club's first executive director, David Brower, as well as The Nature Conservancy's founder, Richard Pough, and supplied data to scientist Rachel Carson, who linked the use of DDT to declining bird populations in her best-selling book, Silent Spring. And yet much of this history would be lost if not for Dyana Furmansky's new book, Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists.

Furmansky serves up something akin to insider's gossip, touching upon the founding of The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club and Edge's own Emergency Conservation Committee; she also sheds necessary light upon some of Edge's contemporaries. In recent years, for example, the nation's first Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot, has been afforded a green halo of sorts, especially in comparison with Bush administration appointees. It's worth remembering, though, that Pinchot was adamant that when it came to forests, "trees and other reserve natural resources were for economic use."

At a time when the future of environmentalism -- and the planet -- is in question, Furmansky's book pays tribute to a woman who protected ecosystems during difficult economic times, penning inflammatory pamphlets to incite public outrage, harassing the staid leaders of organizations such as Audubon, and lending her voice to scientists too nervous to publicly question common practices, such as poisoning and trapping wildlife.

Edge had fire in the belly -- and Furmansky's book serves as a timely reminder that today's conservation movement could use a few more firebrands.